Safe Passage
by Jack E
Summary: The adventures of Isla de Muerte may have passed--but the journey back to Port Royal stretches on, as what awaits can only be heartache, grief and even death. CotBP insert.


DISCLAIMER: _I do not and will never own any of the characters or settings appearing in this chapter. They were conceived by Ted Elliot & Terry Rossio, Jay Wolpert and Stuart Beattie and are owned by Disney Enterprises, Inc. Some of the dialogue can be connected to the first film.

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Safe Passage  
'_Specters in the Fog_' 

It seemed Jack Sparrow could go nowhere without betrayal and pseudo friends following him, taking from him, leaving him. What sort of person managed to attract such queues of injurious luck and individuals to himself in such a manner? It seemed devilish, unjust and cruel. How could one person go throughout life without any such difficulties while others were incessantly harassed and taunted by them? Why did it have to be that way?

Why did _anything_ have to be the way it now was? No thoughts of the ills Sparrow faced could distract her from her own. No mask, no song, no act could hide her sorrow.

She needed sleep.

Despite an insistent breeze, the moist stuffy heat of the isle's caverns and lack of noise made it easy for eyelids to grow heavy and droop. A dull throb had grown to pulse between the skin and the bone of her forehead, and her throat was constricted and aching, but she'd be blown the ends of the earth before she let herself go. When their tiny boat was met with nothing but open sea, Elizabeth realized how cold it was with only suddenness. Though the air outside wasn't unusually chill, it stung her with a temperature that befitted the bitter sorrow and pity she felt. So she stomached it.

Her throat contracted sorely before she swallowed, a doubtfulness in herself clouding over her desire to use her voice in any manner just as she chose to speak.

"I'm sorry, Jack." The words sounded insubstantial and insignificant to her ears as they flew from her lips, her voice soft and meager. If Jack took any heart to them she was unable to tell, though she wouldn't have been in the least surprised if they simply passed him by like a thought on wings, unheeded and unnoticed. No words, she knew, could reconcile her in her own plight on this wicked night. Why should they touch him?

Yet Jack sighed, as the rowboat swelled up and down with the rolling waves, his breath as soft as their murmur, and he shook his head in a subtle motion that looked to be half-heartedly to his own self. Though she could not see his face, Elizabeth was faced with the despondency of his image. He seemed a picture of her own heart, wishing to slump as if a world of care had been dropped in an instant upon his already world-weary shoulders. He had been, only moments before, a man with such charisma as to put a hoard of five-year-old children to bed with fatigue, dreaming of lilies and fields of sunshine. She had been vibrant, feeling flame coursing through her veins as she danced, emancipated, her hands grazing and leaving the grasps of what seemed to be sun of her wild universe—the source of her sudden fire. With an abruptness that was all but expected, it was doused. As for Jack, certain things seemed to catch up with him, closely entwined with the hurts of his years. And his voice bespoke of it.

"They've done what's right by them—can't expect any more than that."

A fleeting shadow passed over Elizabeth's face as a pang of commiseration struck her heart. Ten years. Could she have such strength? To stand for ten years without the one she loved...? He had. Ten dauntingly overlong turns of winters gone by without a ghost of hope or success, and still he pursued, with an incentive to challenge Hercules in strength, after his ship. His freedom.

'_That's what a ship is, yeh know. It's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails— that's what a ship needs. But what a ship _is_. What the _Black Pearl_ is…is freedom_.'

Freedom? If only it were that simple! Here was she, free of chains and able to sail on ships to wherever she found to her liking, and yet she discovered herself staring out her glossy window at twilight, craving for liberation from her life and its restrictions on the basest appetites of her heart. Ten years? If only it were so—for her sentence now threatened to stretch for the expanse of all eternity! If she could only love the man she pleased, regardless of his standing on the wicked steps of society: iron bars that separated Elizabeth from her innocent dreams in a song. If only she had the skills of a blacksmith, that she might break those bars away and open a hole to escape. Then she'd have found her freedom. But was it only a dream? Nothing more than sigh of, '_If only…_?'

If only….

As Will silently began to draw on the roughened oars of their little longboat and approach the_ Dauntless_, Elizabeth turned and let her thoughts take on shoes of their own liking, to wander down highways of their own make, fleeing from the exertions of concepts too often trodden through, and flying from the pains of roads recently embedded with thorns and shards of glass.

Her eyes roamed over the profile of the man beside her, framed against the chill of a tremoring silver moon. Her sight meandered on slow wheels over the shadow that was his face, void of passion but full of distant pensiveness as she gave up the control of the thoroughfares of her deliberations. The eyes of William were once again sicklied over with a shrouded veil against the world, too lost in the dissolute paths of thought to sense Elizabeth's gaze. She observed gently how, since the course of their adventure, his complexion hadn't altered too much in neither hue nor texture. No new creases, no blemishes; nothing had placed a mark where there had once been none, nor left footprint of one ever being there over the space of time. There was the appearance of facial hair about his lips where there had been none before, but…

Though it seemed loath to her presence, change had come to Will. His face, regardless of whether it had in truth undergone next to no altering, seemed to belong to two different beings; a faint blend of the ghost of a boy she knew in Port Royal and the penumbra of a man she met someplace she either could not bethink or did not yet know.

His changes had become evident with a suddenness and flagrancy that frightened her at the time, unexpectedly delayed. He wasn't the soft-spoken and reluctant child she had known before—though she had always known that child never was him. That child was now diminished and hidden, if not lost to her and the rest of the world, and a new person had taken its place. This William was bold and courageous with defiance. This William had strength and potency behind a lethal hand. He would strike men down with speed and force too sure to obstruct. His eyes would flash with fire and lightning and his voice boom in commanding anger. Never before had he raised his voice to anyone. Yet now, rash and unpredictable in her sight, he would tolerate no man to defy the desires he held close to himself.

This was the William she had dreamed of. Or he had been that Will... moments before...

Since they were young, above all else, he had always taunted her with his eyes. His eyes had always shone with a bright innocence and throe that reminded her of the shadowed reflections of willows and grey skies mirroring off the broken surface of a rippling pool. Chill, bright, yearning, ardent. His heart had clutched at the sharp fragments of a shattered past, and handled them with a care that belied his years. He was so young, and yet, already so afraid of cutting himself on the numerous shards. His youthful distress had often caused her heart to throb in some measure of pity. She too was young, but had only managed to receive a few cracks in the mirror of her yesterdays and yesteryears—a sharp contrast to his devastating decimation. Sometimes she would wonder whether, ever, in the depths of impenetrable solitude, he sat alone and wept at the slothfulness with which his sundered world was being pieced together, at the fact that some pieces were lost and would never be found.

The boy she had known had been a quiet, respecting lad, always keeping his voice soft, his head declined and his eyes lowered when decorum called without fail. Ever wary of the barring rules of society about their world, never did he retort or protest to any utterance, any look, any gesture, no matter how much thought or heart such deeds lacked. He went about his way, doing his daily duties with tacit dexterity and noiseless unselfish breaths; wordlessly smothering the regrets that flashed in his heart when his work went unnoticed—having been attributed to a drunk barely able to care for his own self—without a second thought. Every word was whispered with the utmost propriety and preciseness for the moment, a lowly meekness shivering through his form. '_Miss Swann_,' he'd call, the promise of a smile waxing and waning away in the tick of a moment, and nothing more….

Presently, Will's breath was steady and smooth as blackened-amber eyes that were partially guarded, stinging with bitter cold in their half-nakedness, turned to looking out to black and blue-rippled waters as he gave the oars another steady draw, the boat gliding as smooth as a bird on a stable wind in a clear-cut sky. Too often before, those eyes had seemed overly-bright with a naïveté and innocence of youth, frightened and unsure of the world about him; still they shone, with a certain measure of pure goodness leftover from before.

Only a few times had she been permitted to peek behind his mask. Only deep within his eyes could she see any trace of his old self now, buried under a mask of a man she didn't know, in a darkness in which she wondered whether it festered while it hid its eyes from the world: a face she could not identify, and a cloak that prevented her from knowing him the way she once did any longer.

He was a strange sort, sad and alone in bearing the burdens of old woes and nursing long-borne wounds. His eyes were oftentimes mournfully veiled with the specters and memories of events well gone. But at moments from a past long lost, instances she considered rare and special, the shadows would recede and a warmer luminosity would supplant them for a time. At such moments, when they had time to talk—to truly bear peeks at one another's hearts and souls—his eyes would twinkle with the merriest light, allowing words to slip gently from sober lips. Then that promise of a smile would bloom, enhancing the gladness in his expression until it pierced her. Once she had even heard the full fleshed sound of his elusive laugh.

Once.

She wasn't sure if she remembered the sound rightly, it had been so singular. But she tried. And, if anything else was certain, she remembered _him, _that day. He had no longer been the child found through the fog towards death, or the lowly apprentice to the shining craftsman of Port Royal, or the cordial acquaintance from once upon a time. He had just been Will. And he had been perfect.

Perhaps that was when she had realized...

A wave of emotion attempted to take her, but she held her ground, biting her lip and turning away from Turner. She was unwilling to admit it, yet the tears that pricked her eyes were not new. That was the fact. Not even Elizabeth Swann could change irrevocable fact.

In Port Royal, sometimes she had grown angered at his lack of impudence. More than she had ought to, admittedly. But how could she help it? He cared, so much, about the concerns behind watchful eyes and judgmental ears of a people prim, powdered, proper and too proud to consider the idea of their being equal to _any_ person of lesser fortune. Why? Why didn't he recognize that, no matter what he did, their eyes would always be accusatory and their tongues sharp with bitter words behind his back? Why didn't he realize that, despite all reason, she wasn't a part of those other fiends? That she could be his friend? That she wanted him to take the hand she extended to him? That she would grow so flustered and angry from his insistence for propriety that she'd set her mind against ever speaking to him again…but, in the end, couldn't resist, somehow, coming back?

Why would he not dare to even venture and say her name? Laugh with his own voice? Look her in the eye from his true face? Just once more…

'_As always._'

That had been when, she'd feel tears burn in her eyes, and her throat tighten with knots of choking self sentiment. Pressing smooth, solid palm's-heels to her hot, flushing lids, she'd stop herself and wonder: why did it matter to_ her_ so? Any of it? It was her world—no matter of perspective would change the way they treated her. Besides, there were plenty of _other_ people in the world who looked upon her with heads bent in unspoken respect, soft lips muttering, '_Miss Swann_,' as she passed them by in genteel tones. Estrella, her maid, did so daily. And Commodore Norrington; with all the nobility and courtesy available to a man of any state, he did so too. Why, then? Out of all the people in the world she knew, all this for a dirty surrogate of blacksmith? Why did his manner with her matter?

'_It doesn't_…' she'd retort to herself, angrily, stubbornly. 'He_ doesn't. He's a blacksmith— he never mattered. We never speak to each other, never see each other… Our lives are un-entwined at their least, and completely divergent at their best. I don't care what he says or does or—or _anything_ about him, for that matter._ _None of it matters to me. Not at all_…'

But somewhere, hurting deep inside, she knew she was deliberately deceiving herself; though she knew not why. Even now, as the boat came to a stop with a soft bump and the topic of her speculations stood, waiting and ready for the observation of someone in the massive ship above, she bit her lip and disowned such ideas, casting them aside as swiftly was a voice on the hastening sea's waves, even as her heart cried out in anguish. How long did she dare continue with such treachery? Forever?

She wished, desperately against it.

But when the time came, she _would_ deny it again. For, even if she desired otherwise, it was too late to change. She had made a choice and there was no going back. Her hand was given. The thought was frigid and stung fiercely, piercing her tongue with exquisite bitterness…but, one time further, she swallowed it whole. And she was certain, sooner than she had first realized, she would be ill from such foolishness.

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AN: This one is very long and dull, I realize, as it is virtually all vertical introspection on Elizabeth's behalf. But there are hopefully much better things to follow. Bear with me! 


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